By J. H. Irwin
Author | Storyteller | Capturing Life, Memory, and Meaning
In a world that refused to recognize their bond, two men created a private language, endured distance and jealousy, and built a life together that lasted thirty-three years.
When Christopher Isherwood met Don Bachardy on a Southern California beach in 1952, the world had no respectable language for what they might become to one another. Isherwood was forty-eight, an established English novelist whose Berlin stories would later help inspire Cabaret. Bachardy was eighteen, a first-year UCLA student who had not yet discovered the artist he would become.
They were separated by thirty years, two countries, vastly different levels of experience, and a society that regarded love between men as something shameful, dangerous, or criminal. Yet within a year, they were living together in Santa Monica, beginning a partnership that would endure until Isherwood’s death in 1986.
Their story was not remarkable because it was perfect. It was remarkable because it survived the forces outside their home and the storms that sometimes erupted within it.
Love Without a Name
In 1950s America, two men could share a home, but they could not marry, publicly claim the ordinary dignity of being a couple, or depend upon the protections heterosexual partners took for granted. Hollywood was filled with gay men and women, but much of that world depended upon discretion, coded language, carefully constructed public identities, and the constant knowledge that exposure could destroy a career.
Isherwood and Bachardy were unusually open about their relationship. Their honesty was courageous, but it did not protect them from gossip, contempt, or the judgment that followed their age difference. Bachardy was sometimes dismissed as a beautiful young man attached to a famous older writer, while Isherwood could be portrayed as a powerful older man controlling someone barely out of adolescence.
Those suspicions were not entirely frivolous. Their relationship began with genuine imbalances in age, money, reputation, and worldly experience. The question was whether Bachardy would remain an extension of Isherwood or grow into a man and artist with an identity of his own.
Isherwood understood that danger better than many outsiders realized. He encouraged Bachardy’s artistic ambitions, supported his education at the Chouinard Art Institute and the Slade School of Fine Art, and helped him enter the artistic circles that would eventually recognize his talent. Bachardy became an accomplished portraitist whose work developed its own authority, allowing the younger man in the relationship to become something more than the beautiful companion of a celebrated writer. The Huntington’s biographical exhibition materials document Isherwood’s support and Bachardy’s emergence as an internationally exhibited artist.
That growth strengthened their partnership, but it also complicated it. Professional travel required long periods of separation, while increasing independence introduced new friendships, temptations, ambitions, and rivalries. Love did not eliminate jealousy, and devotion did not prevent either man from becoming involved with others.
Dobbin and Kitty
When they were apart, Isherwood and Bachardy wrote frequently. In those letters they became “the Animals,” two invented versions of themselves who could say what Christopher and Don sometimes found too frightening or vulnerable to express directly.
Isherwood was Dobbin, an aging, dependable workhorse who guarded the stable and waited for his beloved to return. Bachardy was Kitty, a playful, impulsive and sometimes temperamental cat. Their shared home became the Basket, the place to which the Animals could always retreat.
The conceit might sound excessively sweet from the outside, but it served a profound emotional purpose. The Animals gave the men a private vocabulary in a world that denied them a public one. Through Dobbin and Kitty, they could be needy, frightened, jealous, sensual and unabashedly affectionate without first having to defend the legitimacy of their love.
In a letter dated March 11, 1963, Isherwood explained that their imaginary identities were “far more than just a nursery joke or a cuteness.” He believed the Animals possessed a life and truth of their own.
Those words reveal something important about queer love during an era of enforced concealment. Dobbin and Kitty were not disguises created because the men were ashamed of themselves. They were an act of emotional freedom, allowing Isherwood and Bachardy to create a small world in which their tenderness required no apology.
The society surrounding them insisted that their relationship was unnatural. The Animals answered by making their love part of nature itself.
When the Wires Were Crossed
The letters collected in The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy span 1956 through 1970. They chronicle dinners, professional obligations, friends, bills, travel, gossip, artistic success, sexual attraction, infidelity, loneliness, resentment, and reconciliation. Editor Katherine Bucknell selected approximately 250 letters, preserving not an idealized romance but the working anatomy of a long relationship. Bucknell describes the collection and its creation as the intimate record of a lasting gay partnership surrounded by twentieth-century cultural life.
One of Isherwood’s most revealing letters came during a period of misunderstanding in March 1963. He began with a plea that has surely been felt in almost every enduring relationship:
“If only we could talk!”
The sentence is simple, but the fear behind it is not. Isherwood recognized that he and Bachardy were studying each other for clues, interpreting pauses and changes of tone instead of confronting what they feared. Each man wanted honesty, yet each also understood that complete honesty might expose jealousy, dependency, or the possibility that the other could leave.
Isherwood admitted that they were engaged in a kind of emotional poker game. They watched one another, attempted to appear untroubled, and sometimes performed calmness in ways that only created greater tension.
Near the end of the letter, Isherwood confessed:
“I really do ache with misery when the wires are crossed.”
This is not the polished language of a famous novelist trying to create literature. It is the voice of a man afraid that he cannot reach the person he loves. The ache comes not merely from disagreement, but from the loneliness of being misunderstood by the one person whose understanding matters most.
He ended the letter with the smallest and most vulnerable declaration of all:
“I love you. C.”
After the explanations, self-questioning and emotional confusion, love remained the one thing Isherwood could state without qualification. He did not claim that love had solved the problem. He offered it as the reason the problem had to be faced.
The March 1963 letter published by The Paris Review reveals that endurance is not achieved by never becoming frightened or resentful. It is achieved when two people continue reaching toward each other after fear has made communication difficult.
Love as Work
The mythology surrounding lifelong love often encourages us to believe that the right relationship should feel effortless. Isherwood and Bachardy’s correspondence tells a more useful truth. Their love lasted because it received attention, language, humor, confrontation, forgiveness and work.
They were not always faithful in a conventional sense, and they sometimes came dangerously close to separating. In 1968, while David Hockney was creating his now-famous double portrait of the couple, Bachardy fell in love with another man. The serene domesticity of Hockney’s painting concealed a relationship under enormous strain.
Yet their crises did not erase what they had built. Both men continued returning to the Basket and to one another. Their partnership survived jealousy, affairs, professional competition, long absences, social hostility and the evolving needs of two people who had met at profoundly different stages of life. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes their bond as an emotional, professional and sexual partnership maintained during a period of intense hostility toward gay people.
This does not mean every relationship should be preserved regardless of the damage it causes. Endurance alone does not make love virtuous. What distinguished Isherwood and Bachardy was their continuing effort to allow each other to become more fully themselves.
Isherwood helped a young man discover his artistic calling. Bachardy refused to remain merely the young man Isherwood had first met. Their relationship endured because it evolved from an unequal beginning into a partnership between two established artists, each capable of challenging, unsettling and sustaining the other.
The Final Portrait
In 1985, Christopher Isherwood was dying of cancer. By then, the young man he had met on the beach had become a fifty-one-year-old artist, and the famous older writer had become physically fragile and dependent upon the man he had once protected.
Bachardy responded in the language he knew best. He drew and painted Isherwood repeatedly, recording the changes in his face and body with an honesty that was neither sentimental nor cruel. According to The Huntington, Bachardy produced more portraits in 1985 than in any other year of his career, and Isherwood was the subject of most of them.
The reversal is profoundly moving. Dobbin had once waited beside the stable, offering protection to Kitty. Now Bachardy kept watch, studying the man he loved with the concentration of an artist and the tenderness of a partner preparing to lose the person who had shared nearly his entire adult life.
Isherwood died at their Santa Monica home on January 4, 1986. Bachardy was beside him, bringing their thirty-three years together to the only conclusion time permits an enduring love story.
The letters had stopped years earlier, but the conversation continued through their home, their collaborations, Bachardy’s portraits and the life they had created. After Isherwood’s death, Bachardy helped establish the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, placed Isherwood’s papers at The Huntington, and authorized the publication of selected diaries and love letters.
Their relationship did not survive death in the literal sense. It survived as testimony.
Still In Love
Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy lived during a period when the world considered their love less worthy, less moral and less real than the relationships around them. They answered that judgment not by becoming flawless representatives of gay respectability, but by living together openly, imperfectly and persistently.
Their letters reveal that love is not proven by the absence of fear. It is revealed in the decision to speak after fear has silenced us, to return after distance has unsettled us, and to keep seeing the person before us as someone whose inner life remains worthy of attention.
Dobbin and Kitty created a Basket because the larger world had not made a home for them. In doing so, Christopher and Don helped make that world a little larger for everyone who came after them.
They were not simply in love. Through jealousy, separation, growth, illness and time, they remained in love.
Source and correspondence credit
The excerpts in this feature were written by Christopher Isherwood to Don Bachardy in March 1963, with the Animals passage specifically dated March 11, 1963. The correspondence appears in The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, edited and introduced by Katherine Bucknell and published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014. The original letters are held within the Christopher Isherwood Papers at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The archive’s preferred citation is: “[Identification of item], Christopher Isherwood papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.” View the official archival finding aid.
Readers can purchase the authorized edition from the publisher or explore the authorized audio adaptation through The Animals podcast.
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